Beyond Mourning: Psychoanalysis in a Time of Climate Crisis
Starts:
Finishes:
Venue:
Birkbeck Central
This event is free to attend but registration is required. Please use the link above to book your place.
If you intend to attend all sessions, please make sure that you book 3 tickets, once for each session. It is important that you select the appropriate ticket band depending on your dates of attendance as additional material will be emailed to you closer to the beginning of this series based on your chosen sessions.
Synopsis for this 3-sessions series:
How do we stay creative in a time of climate crisis? There is a body of psychoanalytic and scholarly literature which establishes dialogues between psychoanalysis, climate psychology and environmental humanities, taking its inspiration from Freud’s work on mourning. My first lecture introduces the ecopsychoanalytic field of grief and mourning, so as to establish a point of departure for my second and third lectures. These experiment with the radical argument that creative responses to the climate emergency need to go beyond the work of mourning. From his essay “On Transience” (1915) and his canonical “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) to his later The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud changed his mind about mourning; he came to regard it as a task difficult if not impossible to achieve. If this is the case, in the face of climate breakdown, one approach might be to think with and beyond mourning. To do so involves experimenting with states of ‘strangeness’ and constructive process of both societal and psychical ‘dissolution.’ Therefore, my second and third lectures explore critical analyses which invite into our psyches, the nonhuman world, with its entanglement of beauties, dangers and threats. Here, the challenge is not to treat the nonhuman as a benign source of biophilia, but rather, to explore Timothy Morton’s “strange stranger” as that ‘Other’ who can simultaneously excite and terrify (2010). Morton’s concept can discover pathways of psychical vulnerability, and ones which can be read as politically generative. My third lecture explores, in the context of climate events, how human psyches, both singular and collective, experience death and the death drive. Here, Jacqueline Rose’s “To Die One’s Own Death” (2023) offers a creative opening for considering how death and dissolution might offer as yet unseen possibilities for living in a time of climate crisis.
Session 1: Time: 13.30-16.00. Date: Thursday, 21/11/2024.
“Beyond Mourning: Boundary Crossings in Ecopsychoanalysis.”
Session 2: Time: 13.30-16.00. Date: Thursday, 28/11/2024.
“Strange Strangers, or Don’t Eat my Pets!: Lacanian Extimacy, ‘Cat Ladies’ and other Animals.”
Session 3: Time: 13.30-16.00. Date: Thursday, 5/12/2024.
“Death Becomes ‘Her’: Gaslighting the Death Drive and other Pleasures.”
Catherine Lord is an author, scholar and senior lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, teaching in Literature and Cultural Analysis, as well as Media and Culture. Her research explores the interdisciplinary fields between environmental humanities, psychoanalysis, feminism, and queer studies. She has published on the writings of Walter Benjamin, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jeannette Winterson, and Baudelaire. Her forthcoming publications explore ecological citizenship in the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy (Palgrave), and offer an ecopsychoanalytic reading of Mary Oliver’s oeuvre (Comparative American Studies). In cinema studies, Catherine Lord has published on the films of Sally Potter, Werner Herzog, Franny Armstrong, and Patrick Keiller. Her current book project addresses the theme of ‘beyond mourning’ in ecopsychoanalysis. She is also a performance-based researcher in art film and theatre.
https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/l/o/c.m.lord/c.m.lord.html
Contact name:
Dr Elia Ntaousani